Comments on: publishing your dotfiles

By: Binny V A

Binny V A — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 17:37:21 +0000

There is another option – you can publish you dot files in a site like http://dotfiles.org/

By: Yi Qiang

Yi Qiang — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 17:01:03 +0000

@BVK Chaitanya
Cool, I was pretty sure that other people are doing similar things. Let me know if you come up with any cool tips/tricks. I’ve started signing the revisions using hg sign like one commenter suggested already.

By: BVK Chaitanya

BVK Chaitanya — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 10:07:26 +0000

Interesting…I use exactly the same way and same site. Mine could be found at http://freehg.org/u/bvk/config

I don’t have any script to create the symlinks yet, but i have plans to do it from sometime.

By: SJS

SJS — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 06:46:20 +0000

Mercurial supports ssh, which handles the network security aspect. Storing your configuration data on someone else’s server is kind of dumb — you’re needlessly trusting someone, thus leaving yourself vulnerable to their system becoming compromised also compromising your system.

If you have sufficient *nix accounts to make this sort trick useful, then you can probably host your definitive repository on your most stable (and trusted) machine. If you insist on centralizing your dotfiles, you might as well as use CVS.

Finally, creating a large suite of platform-independent initialization scripts can get a bit tricky, especially if you’re not working on a homogenous network of machines. One of the more useful things to do with initialization files is to handle differences between machines — on alpha.yourdomain.tld you may use /usr/local for locally installed files, while on beta.mydomain.tld I use /opt, and your ISP’s gamma.isp.tld uses /sfw… take special care when writing your dotfiles.

By: itsadok

itsadok — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 06:38:43 +0000

I believe that:
ln -s ~/hg/dot_files/* ~/
should do the trick.
You might want to do -sf, to override whichever dot files are already in there.

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 02:01:53 +0000

This is a nice idea, but I think the make symlinks script could be done much more succinctly in bash shell rather than python. I have something similar, and my make symlinks script looks like this:

$DIR=~/hg/dotfiles/home_dir
cd $DIR
for i in *; do ln -s $DIR/$i ~/.$i; done

If you need the excludes functionality, then you can turn on the extglob option in bash and use a pattern like !(make_symlinks.sh) instead of *.

By: Yi Qiang

Yi Qiang — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 01:07:46 +0000

Cool. I actually had the extension enabled and totally forgot about it. Good suggestion!

By: X Y

X Y — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 00:22:53 +0000

Sign the changesets, and only accept signed changesets.
http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/GpgExtension

By: admin

admin — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 23:09:56 +0000

Hey Andrew,
That’s a great point. I suspect though that there are quite a few things I do everyday which is being transferred as clear text that could compromise security in one way or another. Maybe freehg.org will provide https. I’ll definitely ask the guy who runs it.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 22:59:37 +0000

Of course, you should be aware that many of those files could easily be used to compromise your system if modified by a third party, and so automatically receiving them over an insecure network without any form of cryptographic integrity checking (which you won’t get with the recipe in the post) is a bit like asking for your computer to be compromised.